It had been 24 years since Chameleons released a full-length album, but the arrival of Arctic Moon in September did not feel like a reunion driven by nostalgia. Instead, it grew out of something much simpler: the band members found themselves restless, reconnecting, and suddenly in a place where making new music felt natural again. Known for their emotionally charged, atmospheric sound and long considered one of Manchester’s most influential cult bands, Chameleons approached this new chapter without a grand plan, only a curiosity about what might happen if they worked together after so much time apart.
Chameleons are Reg Smithies (guitar), Vox (Mark Burgess, bass, vocals, lyrics), Stephen Rice (guitar), Danny Ashberry (keyboards), and Todd Demma (drums). While most members had been busy with their own projects over the years, they had not written together in a long time, and Burgess expected a slow adjustment period. Instead, ideas began taking shape almost immediately. Songs came together faster than anyone anticipated, and the 2024 EP Tomorrow Remember Yesterday, which revisited unreleased early material, served as a creative warm-up. Rather than trying to recreate the past, they let the process follow the natural energy of the current lineup.
Wanting listeners to experience the new songs fully formed, the band kept the material off their live setlists to avoid leaks, a sharp contrast to their early days of writing onstage. “Where Are You?” had appeared on a 2024 EP, but a new version was recorded for Arctic Moon to reflect how the piece evolved once the full group played it together. “David Bowie Takes My Hand” also began as an early musical sketch and grew into something intense and deeply personal for Burgess.
Arctic Moon is an album that feels unmistakably like Chameleons while still standing entirely on its own. Speaking from their bus during the fall US tour, the band discussed how it all came together.
It had been 24 years since your last full-length album. What convinced you that the time was right to do another?
Mark: Was just really bored, so we all got together and said, “Let’s make a record.” The planets aligned. At first, they didn’t align. We ended up having trouble getting our heads around it because they weren’t aligning. Then COVID got in the way and the industry shut down for two years. That was a problem, but once things started to line up again, it felt like the most natural thing to do. If you’ve got a former band and people want to make a new record, and people are prepared to do it, and some other people are prepared to pay for it, then you go and make a new record and see what you can do.
We didn’t really know what we were going to end up with. We had ideas, fragmentary ideas, we were interested, but we didn’t know whether we’d have anything worth releasing at the end. Everybody else seemed more confident than we did.
What was the overall timeframe like? Did the writing span many years, or did you come together and do it all in one block of time?
Mark: Yeah, in the end we did pretty much. It wasn’t like 25 years of doing absolutely nothing. We were all doing different things. Stephen does his own thing. I think Rich was the only one who had really stepped out of music completely. He left it to raise his family. Todd’s always kept his hand in it. Danny had always kept his in it, working with people. I’d worked with Danny on a project, and he’d been part of ChameleonsVox for a while with other people. So we’d all kind of done things.
When we came together, we just brought what we had. I thought it was going to take a lot longer. I thought it would take ages. Because I knew I could write with Rich, we had history, but he hadn’t done that in a long time. The other guys I’d worked with, but not written with. So I thought it was going to be a long process learning how to do that with people you’d never written with before. But it was all really fast and organic. We had the basic ideas within a matter of weeks, and the rest of the time was spent refining, arranging, developing. It was a lot quicker than I thought.
Reg: Well, they’re making more sense now that we’re playing them live. We hadn’t played them live [at the time for recording].
Mark: And that’s not uncommon. That happened a lot. “Caution” was like that. We wrote and arranged it in the studio, and then everyone put their thing on it. When I went to do the vocal, I had no clue what I was going to do. In the end I turned the lights out, did six takes, and we compiled it. But we’d never performed it, and then going out and playing it, it evolves. It keeps evolving.
We play “Second Skin,” from the first album, and what we’re doing now is so evolved from the way it was originally written and recorded. You’re always writing it. To me as the vocalist and lyricist, I’m always playing around with things while the ideas are still fresh. Some songs like “Soul in Isolation,” “Second Skin,” they’ve evolved over time. And it’s great performing this now because we’re really enjoying performing.
You avoided playing the new material live because you didn’t want it leaked. Was that frustrating?
Mark: Well, yes and no. We were excited about playing new, fresh material rather than material written 35 years ago. That’s frustrating. We were very pleased with the new material, very excited by it.
On the other hand, like Reg said, we hadn’t had an opportunity to play them live. We hadn’t played them as the finished article. So we weren’t ready for that anyway, but I was the most vocal because I talk the most. I felt it was like a movie. You don’t go on YouTube and say, “I’ve got a new movie coming out and here’s how it ends.” You want it to have maximum impact. If you release an album people have already heard live, it’s an anti-climax.
Quite a lot of people were anticipating this. I wanted it to have impact. When we started, it wasn’t like now. People didn’t record every gig and pass it around the next day.
Reg: We used to write a song in the afternoon and play it live that night. Sometimes we wrote it on stage.
Mark: “One Flesh” was written on stage, half of it, no lyrics whatsoever. I remember saying, “What do we do when we get to that part?” And they said, “I don’t know.” So, we made it up as we went along. Our sound engineer taped it, thank God. We were the only ones who had it. Nowadays it would be online in an hour.
Did revisiting the early material on Tomorrow Remember Yesterday influence the new music?
Danny: It was meant to get us into recording as a band, reworking old ideas, just to take it forward. Like a training session.
Mark: Yeah, it got us up and running rather than going into the studio cold. What was interesting was seeing what each person could inject in terms of freshness. Some of those songs we’d set aside because we didn’t know how to execute them at the time. We didn’t know where to go with them.
Reg: You’re moving so fast anyway.
Mark: Right. [When we started] we were focused on songwriting, not on learning to play live. Dave and Reg had done live stuff, but I hadn’t. John had done a bit. We wanted to focus on songwriting rather than playing pubs where no one cared. That’s what we pushed.
Some ideas didn’t develop. We might have demoed them, but the ones that did develop felt more interesting. We wanted to see what the band as we are now would do with those ideas. And me, as the singer, I’m bouncing off the backing track. In the case of “Every Day I’m Crucified,” I finished the song with these guys. It’s got a chorus now. That came from the freshness everyone was adding.
It gave us confidence. I think that version of “The Fan and the Bellows” is the best I’ve done with anyone. It tied things together. It bridged the gap between the legacy Chameleons and the Chameleons now.
We did those songs before we even had a Peel session. It felt like going back to the very root of the band, before Peel, before Steve Lillywhite, before the Roland 201 [Space Echo] defined the sound. But instead of going the path that led to “In Shreds” and Script of the Bridge, now we’re going another way. Like a second bite of the cherry.
You also put out an earlier version of “Where Are You?” What led to redoing it for the album?
Stephen: We couldn’t all get in the studio at the same time. I was on drums for that version, Reg did all the guitars, Todd added keys from home, Vox did vocals. But as we played it together later, we found new ideas. I had guitar ideas I hadn’t put down yet. We wanted a fresh version for the album.
Mark: Rich said something good the other day. He said it was a shame we couldn’t do that process for all of them. The old way was healthier: write the song, arrange it, then go out and play it to improve it before recording. But we don’t live in that world anymore.
By the time we finished the album, we’d been playing “Where Are You?” live with the actual drummer. Stephen focused on guitar. And because it was the first real collaboration between Reg and me, even the verse melody was his, not mine. I made it mine, put my words through it, but it started with him.
After touring, it was way better than the single version. And people aren’t paying for the same thing twice. If they liked the single, they’ll love the album version. It’s bigger, better mixed, and we’re more confident. It’s a great opener.
Have any older songs taken on a new life with the current lineup?
Mark: Legacy ones? Yeah. We never played “The Fan and the Bellows” because with the old lineup it always sounded shit.
Reg: All the songs are different now. I listened to Script of the Bridge. It’s so of its time. Now live they’re harder, grittier.
Mark: I didn’t know how to be a singer when I made Script. I’d played bass about a year. Coming off punk. I hadn’t found my voice. I didn’t find it until about 1986. Singers emulate the people they admire at first. If you listen to Bowie’s early records, he’s trying out different voices. The aim is to get a voice that’s recognizably yours.
I can’t listen to those early records. I hear my vocals and go, “Bah.” I hadn’t found it. That’s why I sing them now instead of shouting them like I did in the punk days. And if we weren’t improving them or making them our own, we wouldn’t play them.
Reg: Things morph.
Mark: Exactly. Songs have to feel fresh, or you can’t perform them. Otherwise, it’s perfunctory, and this band is never perfunctory. We put everything into it.
ChameleonsVox was about celebrating the music. It wasn’t about taking it forward. And when we first started that, the idea wasn’t to emulate the original band. It was to interpret the songs our own way. Stephen Foxcroft played them his way. Nothing like the original. Over time we became more deferential, but in the beginning it was like a cover band.
“David Bowie Takes My Hand” feels like a highlight. What can you tell me about it?
Reg: It was one of the earliest things we did.
Danny: Before Todd and Stephen arrived at the studio, me, Reg and Vox had a week kicking around ideas.
Mark: I had fragments, but didn’t know how to execute them. Reg would say, “Go to D A D7,” or change the timing, and it became the chorus. It came together naturally. We were excited.
Danny: I added that spooky two-note keyboard thing.
Mark: The problem was it was over ten minutes long. We couldn’t figure out the structure. Danny loved it, took it home, did a cut-and-paste arrangement, and came back with an eight-minute version. It didn’t feel long. Brilliant arrangement.
The working title was “Dave Bowie” because the C minor to E minor reminded me of “Space Oddity.”
And then I had a horrendous 2024 personally. There was one of the darkest 48 hours of my life. In a hotel room in Berlin, completely numb. “Rock and Roll Suicide” came on. I’d always loved it, but suddenly it was describing exactly how I felt. The second half — that hope and empathy — pulled me out. I cried. I played it over and over.
So when I came back and saw the working title “David Bowie,” I said, “We’re keeping it. It’s going to be called ‘David Bowie Takes My Hand,’ because that’s what happened.”
It gave me a new understanding of the healing power of music. People tell me our music got them through things, but I couldn’t relate to that with my own work. Until that happened. This album saved me too.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Mark: We are absolutely proud of what we’ve created with this record. It’s moved the music forward. It continues the tradition of doing what we want to do naturally, not what’s expected. We don’t sit down thinking, “How can we make this different?” It just happens. And when it evolves naturally, that’s the real deal.
I’d been saying for months that the record would polarize people. All the familiar elements are there. It’s still a Chameleons record, but it moves forward. And every time we’ve moved forward, the audience has polarized.
When we released In Shreds, people loved it, but when they bought they album people were like ‘it’s not like In Shreds.’ Same with What Does Anything Mean? Basically, same with Strange Times. Each time, the audience split.
My surprise is how small the polarization on Arctic Moon is. I thought it would divide the audience in half. But we didn’t lose half. Only a small percentage can’t connect, for whatever reason.
And that’s fine. I’ve been in that situation. I’m a massive Bowie fan and when I heard Young Americans I said, “What the fuck is that? You can’t do soul, you’re white!” So I get it. We don’t resent it.
We don’t need external validation. We know. If this was mediocre, I’d say, “I don’t want my name on it.” But the opposite is true. To me, Arctic Moon is the best record I’ve ever worked on.
Purchase the album chameleonsuk.bandcamp.com. For more info, visit chameleonsband.com.
